Matt Gibbons

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find-if it's a good novel-that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to just say just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death. To recommend country life to a city person so that he can stay alive is a dirty internist's trick, I thought. All these people who leave the city for the country so they can live longer and healthier lives are only horrible specimens of human beings, I thought.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“We should have gone little beyond the Yanomamo if the net outcome of the sexual revolution is a secure position for women at the head of mace squads or in the nuclear command posts.”
― Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture